Monday, April 28, 2008

[UPDATE: I decided to change the name of this series from "Songs Without Vocal Chords" to "Songs Without Singers." The former is funnier, but the latter is more mellifluous.]

One of the many joys of being an accompanist has been discovering beautiful piano parts that just happen to have voice parts added to them. To continue on my piano blogging theme, I present today Chausson's incomparably exquisite Le colibri, which I had the pleasure of playing in recital with a wonderful soprano on Friday. The vocal part is lovely, but I have no attachment at all to the lyrics. So, here it is with just me playing both the vocal part and the accompaniment. There are many songs that can be quite satisfying this way, so I'm hoping to add more. As a disclaimer, I'll add that I'm looking for things that can be put together pretty quickly and recorded without a lot of fuss (aka practice). It's not my goal to expand on the Schubert/Liszt rep, but rather to enjoy some of these songs in the simplest way possible.

The recording quality isn't great, but the waveform for this recording is actually rather attractive. It reminds me more of hummingbirds (subject of the song) than does anything in the music, atlhough that could probably be said of most waveforms.